My wife sent me this article from Perez Hilton about Brad Pitt, who will be appearing on NBC’s Today with Ann Curry to talk about his green development project in New Orleans. I’m not a reader of the celebrity sites, so I would have missed this, but the New Orleans development project is really moving along. And the green houses they are building are 100% incredible. Brad has good style — it fits so well with Jetson Green, we should just bring him on as a regular writer!

Global Green broke ground on the Holy Cross Project on May 10. Yesterday, they unveiled the progress on this first home, which is still under construction. It’s going to be a showcase home, but in total, the Holy Cross Project will have 5 homes and 18 apartments. All of them will be affordable and green. The goals of the project are to achieve LEED Platinum certification (LEED-H for the single family homes and LEED-NC for the other buildings), net zero energy, and carbon neutral building. By using solar panels, high performance building design, HVAC systems, energy and resource monitoring systems, and energy efficient appliances, the buildings in the Holy Cross Project will use at least 75% less energy than typical buildings. In addition, Global Green is also exploring the use of river turbines in the adjacent Mississipi River.

I watched this video of the Jellyfish House by architects Lisa Iwamoto and Craig Scott, and needless to say, I was kind of blown away. It’s quite compelling to watch, but at the same level, it’s complicated. I can’t say I understand everything that’s going on but I like it. Jellyfish are responsive to the environment around them, so like jellyfish, one concept with this house is that water is filtered and harvested through the actual structure of the home. The structure uses UV light filtration, which could come down in price in the future, and titanium dioxide, which is now used for self-cleaning glass in tall skyscrapers. This concept prototype for the future of sustainable living was designed (hypothetically) for Treasure Island, a decommissioned military base in San Francisco Bay with toxic top soil.

A home doesn’t need to be modern to be green, but I like the modern ones. I’d love to see entire neighborhoods of modern green homes. I like the idea of changing the way we perceive the single-family home, too. Denser neighborhoods? Sure. Residential wind turbines? Definitely. Solar on the roof? You bet. But right now, we’re still in the early stages of recognizing legitimate green homes.

This is just a quick administrative post on the status of Jetson Green. I’m pleased to announce that Jetson Green has come upon two major milestones: (1) passing the 100,000 unique visitors threshold + (2) passing the one year mark in existence. As another interesting note, this post is number 400 for Jetson Green. I’m proud of these achievements, but I want to thank the readers of Jetson Green. We’re currently hovering around 900 readers in the feed, so this website is becoming considerable in reach. As you can see from the graph below, it just keeps growing and improving. I think these numbers are incredible, especially because this is a one-person endeavor and we haven’t hit the front page of digg (or similar).

Wired has an interesting story about a new 26-story tower soon to be built in Chicago’s Hyde Park called Windermere West. The building was designed by Jeanne Gang, with a little help from Arup. Here’s the idea: the hottest sun of the year is the highest in the sky and this is when electricity bills skyrocket. So, Gang designed this sawtooth facade effect for roughly 2/3 of the south-facing balconies. At a 71 degree tilt, the glass is angled enough to shade the interiors during that hot period of the day, but not so much that people feel like they will tip over into the streets. Pretty neat?! I wonder if this is actually going to get built. It’s interesting to see how architects come up with creative solutions to incorporating natural light in just the right way.

::"S2" is short for "Skyscraper Sunday," a weekly article on green skyscrapers posted every Sunday::

"It's like a loft you can take anywhere." Ideabox offers a pretty cool product in the modern, prefabricated housing industry. Ideabox emphasizes good design, not square footage, and they make it easy to do. With Ideabox, you're going to get the entire package right to your site. There's one day to install it, one day to build the deck, and that's about it. Depending on your site, all you really need to do is set up the water, power, septic, and sewer systems. You can even go wireless with the turnkey solar system package, too.